Above is a YouTube clip containing a 2008 program with John Anthony West on Red Ice Radio, in which he is interviewed by the remarkable Henrik Palmgren, and in which he explains in his own words many of the concepts underlying his work. Listening to Mr. West's explanation in his own voice provides an excellent complement to reading his Serpent in the Sky text, and enables the listener to pick up on the central idea that animates and connects all the wide-ranging topics covered in the book.

That central idea, I believe, is put forward beginning at about 8:45 in the above video, in which Mr. West says:

And the doctrines are all basically the same -- I mean they take it as a premise, as a given, that we human beings are not accidental glitches in an accidental universe, but that rather we have a specific role to play, which is the acquisition of a level of consciousness that we are not born with, but that we have the potential to reach, and this is what in Egypt is called the "Doctrine of Immortality" and what in other civilizations is called Samadhi or Nirvana or whatever -- I mean, different names for it -- but basically it's the same doctrine: that we're here for a reason, and that if we don't pursue that path, then we do so at our peril.

Later in the interview, he points to Darwinism as the doctrine that leads to the opposite of this ancient belief, in that it teaches that there is not real purpose to human existence, and can thus lead to a pursuit of materialism and a neglect of the true goal of human existence, the acquisition of consciousness.

Thus, Mr. West argues that ancient Egypt is so important because its temples and monuments and art and hieroglyphs reveal a culture which was completely and single-mindedly focused on the acquisition of higher consciousness. Even its common laborers, he argues, were immersed in the art of taking one material and bringing it to a higher level -- the essence of alchemy.

Further, he argues that Egypt is important because the demonstrably advanced level of its knowledge in its very earliest stages upends the typical anthropological timeline of the arrival of mankind that has been enforced in academia since Darwin. The advanced knowledge inherent in some of the monuments of the earliest dynasties is enough to upend this conventional paradigm, but when the evidence for the far greater antiquity of the Sphinx is taken into account, the conventional framework must tumble down.

Thus ancient Egypt is also crucially important by virtue of its ability to defy the modern Darwin-based anthropological paradigm -- the materialist paradigm which has been used for over a hundred years to oppose the pursuit of "the acquisition of consciousness" that Mr. West describes in the quotation above.

This battle between the forces which oppose human consciousness (accidentally or deliberately, it does not much matter) and the imperative of every human being to pursue that "level of consciousness that we are not born with, but that we have the potential to reach" is the central theme of the above interview, I believe, and the central theme of John Anthony West's excellent and eye-opening book.

The entire interview is well worth studying, and can be downloaded for listening on a mobile device by members of the Red Ice Creations website (membership enables access to archived interviews, and to the second hour of all interviews as well -- from the Red Ice website these interviews can be downloaded to iTunes etc. for transfer to a portable music device).

Also, listening to this interview should make you want to participate in one of John Anthony West's actual tours of the sacred sites of Egypt itself, which he memorably describes in the interview as being something that cannot be appreciated merely by reading or seeing photographs or movies, but only in person, where the sacred and harmonic proportions of the monuments resonate with the cosmic proportions that manifest themselves in the human body. Mr. West is leading another tour that departs New York City for Egypt on March 20, 2013 -- details can be found here on his website.

Of course, we can all pray that the violence currently wracking the country will have subsided by then, and that it does not escalate before it subsides.